Category: Art

267 – Dog of the Day 

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The Dog of the Day – my nieces lab Reagan with his birthday hat on. Happy Birthday Reagan!! Did I say a yellow lab is much harder to paint than a black one. Especially with a limited gouache palette.

 All you need for a black lab is a dark indigo blue for the  black with a touch of the English red and a lighter blue and a bit of red for the collar and you gue.



 The yellow lab? 😳 So many shades of cream, buff, peach, Browns, purples, greys and white. Red for the tongue and a bit of dark purple. 

And ps Azo yellow is NOT a good color for a yellow lab. It’s too lemony and turns him green when mixed with white and painted over the colors I was using. Any blue remotely near it turned it green. 😜 Not so with the Indian yellow which is very strange. 

I did use a lot of light purples for the greys. 

Background is watered down turquoise.  

Thanks for looking!  

Day 266 A Few Seagulls or Thoughts on Fifty More Shades of Grey

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Sometimes it’s just fun to go sit in the middle of a parking lot and draw the seagulls. No idea why they congregate in the parking lots but they do. If you decide you want to draw seagulls take some crackers or old bread with you. They will follow you like you are the pied piper. 



I actually drew a lot of seagulls last week but didn’t get around to painting them till a few days ago. I like this one best. Drawn with Noodler Konrad flex nib and Noodler lexington grey ink in my Stillman and Birn Zeta it’s painted with watery gouache. Much faster than using it opaque. Or at least that’s my story so far.  

I have a bunch of premixed greys made from indigo and schminke English red. Sometimes I add more white. Sometimes more indigo. Thee indigo can make a great grey mixed only with the white. Try it.  U will love it.  

Lettering is done with indigo and a brush. The background is turquoise with bits of green made by mixing Indian yellow in with the turq. That makes a muddy green. 

Anyway. Gotta run. My paints are waiting and drying out. 

Thanks for looking. 

Day 256 – Another Dog

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Dogs are big in my family. All of us have at least one and some of us have several. I have two. A Jack Russell who I posted a couple of days ago and a huge lab. Honey is a chow hound. Loves biscuits and I mean the southern kind not cookies but she will eat those too. She is always thinking about food.  

When I got her from the Aiken pound she weighed about 75 lb. We have fixed that. She now weighs about 110 pounds.  The dog seriously loves food. She also steaks food off the kitchen counter especially any bread product. 

Anyway this is drawn with a black Pentel brush pen. The highlights are gouache as is the background.  The lettering is done with the Kuratake brush pen. 



The thought of food makes her joyful. And you can see it I this picture. 

Thanks for looking!! 

Day 255 – Dinosaur time

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It’s a lot of fun to draw dinosaurs. I bought this one recently at Target but I hear I need to start checking goodwill and you consignments for them. I now have four of them as well as a few other animals. 

My grandson loves dinosaurs and trucks. This is a postcard on watercolor paper for him. Next time I think I will let him paint it after I give him some paints. In the meantime I painted it with my caran d’ache since I didn’t feel like getting out the watercolors. 

Added bonus I found two contests to enter it in on Instagram. Who knew they have dino drawing contests on IG?!





Here it is just done with my Noodler Creaper Ahab with carbon Platinum black ink.   It’s about 6×8 on #140 kilimanjaro from cheap joes. 

Thanks for looking. 

Day 254 – Sunday!! 

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Sundays I like to watch CBS Sunday Morning and Super Soul Sunday but not today. Zoe sat down next to me and she was watching to see what I was doing. And I thought “What a great painting she would make! so I took a photo of her.

 And then of course I drew her. If I had drawn her from life she would have gotten on the back of the sofa and turned her back to me before I was done drawing her. 





Zoe version 4. I realized she was way to fat In the last photo so I put her on an instant diet. I think she is done I hope she is done. She lost an inch in about a half an hour. Best diet ever. But who knows?!😃 in the morning she may need something else done. Stillman and birn zeta gouache Kuratake ink pen. #drawyourdog

She went they several stages. This is the finished one. Well you never know I may change her again. Zoe is done in schminke gouache and with my Kuretake brush pen in my Stillman & Burn Zeta. I had thought she was done twice before. 



This was the first time I thought she was done. Till I realized her back should be curved and NOT straight. OOPS!! I did like the odd wonkiness to her face. More on that in a minute. 



Here she is with her back curved the right way. I thought she was done for about a minute till I realized I needed to add some white to the Mohawk down her spine to make it look fluffier.  Back to the gouache. 



So here Zoe is with white hairs added to her Mohawk. Then I realized her nose was a twitch off as was her right eye. I got my #2 Isabey out. It’s a lovely  sable brush that will point like no other. I started adding bits of fine hair here and there on her face with white and caramel colors on her darker bits. I used indigo around her nose mixed with a bit of Sienna for blacks and greys. I also added some whiskers. 

Thanks for looking!!!

Day 253 – It’s Saturday

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so it’s time to go to life modeling. Erica was our model and she always does a great job. She’s a lovely girl who is great fun. I had to bake her some cheese crackers because she missed them last time I made some a few weeks ago. So the rest of the group all got some too.  Anyway I used the caran d’ache and kilimanjaro paper and a lot of paper.

I blocked her in with the yellow ochre crayon. Then I checked her measurements.  They were right!  Sometimes things just work. Sometimes they don’t. This time they did.

I used the plumb lines like Roz Stendahl talked about in Sketchbookskool to check hand and arm placement as well as her ear. Only her ear was off.  Miracles do happen – or maybe it’s practice.

And I had great fun laying on the colors and then spraying them with a very fine mister. Love to let the caran d’ache drip. I am finally learning to control the dripping somewhat. To keep it from running so much. There are two things you can do.  Lay the board down and it will not run as much OR mop it up before it runs. Once it starts running it usually stains the paper and you loose your whites.  I also like rubbing it out with either a damp bounty paper towel or my dads  old hog bristle grumbacher filbert.

If I remember next time I think I will draw her with the flesh colored crayon because I do not like the way the yellow ochre shows thru the background blue and makes an icky green.   Of course I will probably forget  I like that yellow ochre crayon!

I think her head went well. It looks like Erica. It’s very hard to get detailed with the caran d’ache which gives it a dreamy look. It also causes you to loose the whites easily like between  her hands.

I had intended to finish her hands at home because I knew she would move them when she got back into her pose after the first break. Models always do.  Instead I ran a few errands and came home and took a good long nap.

Hopefully I will finish her tonite or tomorrow.

Thanks for looking!

Day 252 – Those Beards!!!

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I must be feeling better because last nite I decided to draw Matthew Perry with his scruffy beard last night a la Roz Stendahl who posted guys with beards lol last week on her blog. I took a pic of him on his show Odd Couple. And that was it. 





Then I drew my son Ben who has been known to sport lots of chin hair of all kinds. They were going so well that I did a third one. 



Have always lived Jonny Lee Miller since I saw him in a Jane Austen movie. Combine him with Sherlock and some chin hair. I had to try. I will say I am not as pleased with him as the first two. 

 What was the quote on Matthew Perry. Ideas at 3 am might not be so great.Well neither are they at 11 pm when I did Johnny!! But they were a lot of fun. So much that when I met my friend Marsha at Waffle House I kept sneaking photos of guys with beards. They were everywhere. 

So how did I do these?  I found that the easiest way to do these was with the Pentel color brush. It’s easy to lighten and move the ink to shade with it. Then I went back in with my Pentel brush own to finish it off.  The background was done with gouache. Lettering with the Pentel brush pen. 

Bytw my son thinks I should do a graphic novel so I guess he linked his. He loves graphic novels and comic books. 

A lot of fun. Bet you can’t do just one!!

Day 251 – The Brown Thrasher

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i had three other things I meant to be working on today instead I drew more birds?! I have had a touch of bronchitis and was sitting on the den sofa feeling bad. I glanced out the window to see a huge brown bird on the back deck. He was at least five times as big as any bird out there. Thrashers are ground dwellers and I had only seen one once before on the deck though I see them in the yard a lot. 

And my sketchbook was in my purse so I grabbed a nearby piece of paper so as not to scare the bird off. 



I drew a few quick sketches before he flew off. 



Using my noodoee flex oen and De Artremis brown document ink I redrew him in my S&B Zeta and added another from memory. Then I painted them with gouache. I used English red, indigo, white and yellow Schminke. The best discovery I had today was that a filbert makes a great comma stroke. I used it to make all the brown marks on his chest. 

Thanks for looking!!

Day 250 – A Painted Collage  

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Our art group took a paper collage class from the very talented Virginia Bojanowski. I painted one of my favorite subjects my sweet dog Zoe. 



Zoe 
5″x7″

Made from painted scraps of paper and old book paper. 

The following is a short version of how it was made. Of course Ginnie had bags of already painted stamped paper pieces that we could use to collage with or we would have been there for days!!  You could substitute any appropriately colored paper for the painted paper we used. 



First we drew our subject on the canvas. Usually a piece of 1/2″ or 3/4″ plywood is used for this but for expediency sake we used a canvas. 

Next we painted the background color.   After it was dry we stamped over it with a stamp. I used a marble texture stamp. 





Then we painted our subject in blocky colors. 



Last using  gel medium  we glued down many pieces of paper starting with the bottom layer to the top aka from her chest to scarf to ears, to dark side of head, to eyes, eyebrows, nose trying to get a 3 d effect.  Difficult to do on such a tiny piece of canvas ripping even tinier bits of paper. 

In Art 130 at UGA we had to copy an Old Master print assigned to us by our teacher. I got an A+ but my rooms floor  was littered with piles of pieces of Life magazine photos trying to match the exact colors. My poor roommate. 

Art 130 was a Josef Albers color theory class, a fascinating class and my favorite that year. 

Let us know if you want your favorite animal done!!

Anyway thanks for looking!!!






Day 249 -More birds

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This is a leftover bit of Sketchbookskool homework I just finished up. One of Cathy Johnson’s assignments was bird drawing. I seem to have gotten stuck there. This is done with caran d’ache watercolor crayons in my Stillman and Birn zeta.

The Stillman and Birn Zeta rivals Strathmore 500 Mixed Media art journals for great paper to work on. It’s much whiter and about the same price. Only problem. I have to get them in Atlanta. Sigh. Nowhere to be bought in Augusta Ga. I can get the Strathmore at Michaels and Hobby Lobby. 

Cardinals frequent my feeder and are a big favorite of mine and most other backyard birders. The males that visit my feeder are more salmon colored than red.

Background cerulean, pen is a Noodler flex pen loaded with de Atremis brown document. I love that color!  Double lines done with my sepia brown Pitt pen. And for once no mistake to cover up with the ledger paper. I just thought it would be a nice addition. I did want to add Washi take but couldn’t find any the right size or color so NO Washi tape. 

Thanks for looking!!

Thanks for looking.